"The UEFI secure boot mechanism has been the source of a great deal of concern in the free software community, and for good reason: it could easily be a mechanism by which we lose control over our own systems. Recently, Red Hat's Matthew Garrett described how the Fedora distribution planned to handle secure boot in the Fedora 18 release. That posting has inspired a great deal of concern and criticism, though, arguably, about the wrong things."

While it's already bad enough that Microsoft is requiring OEMs to use UEFI on their Windows 8 machines, it's downright disgusting that they have mandated it be completely locked on ARM devices, more so that they have the leverage to demand that. The justification is that it isn't anti-competitive on ARM because Windows lags behind on tablets, but that argument collapses when you consider there may (will) be ARM desktops and ultrabooks (well, Intel owns the word "ultrabook", but a rose by any other name...). Microsoft still dominates that market, and consumers really are too dumb to understand what "CPU architecture" means (I dropped that term to a customer by accident, recently, and he thought I meant the form of the case), and why their Windows will have less capabilities than their friend's.